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DISCOVERING BAMBOO’S SOUL IN HISTORIC HOI AN
Updated: 06-11-2007
 Besides its sun-soaked beaches and world-recognized constructions, the ancient Hoi An Town boasts a variety of exquisite craft villages preserving some traditional trades, not the least of which is working with bamboo.
An excursion to the home of artisan Huynh Ry in the Kim Bong carpentry village offers tourists a chance to study bamboo busts of Buddhism’s eighteen La Han, or Arhats in Sanskrit.
The classic Buddhist masters, whose practices allowed them to escape the cycle of physical rebirth and suffering, are carved from giant bamboo stalks with the hair and beards molded from roots.
In another craft village near Cua Dai (Big Estuary) houses made completely of bamboo are available for exploration. Poles, rafters, wattles, furniture, and even household appliances are all made of bamboo.
The same site has also been selected by Norway’s Olso University for its Vietnamese-language students’ overseas academic terms.
For those who are fond of original adaptations of Vietnamese countryside imagery, the Lang Que (Countryside) Tourist Village, opposite the Hoi An Market, displays xe dap nuoc (water bikes), bicycles made from the bamboo pipes used by rice farmers to irrigate their fields since the seventeenth century.
Our tour concludes with a series of bamboo bridges, one stilted across the Cam Nam Islet, another over the Truong Giang River measuring some 300 meters in length, and a solid, fixed-frame overpass linking the riverside communes of Duy Thanh and Duy Hai.
Source: Thanh Nien News
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